Nicole Simone
Empowerment: Cover, D, Y
Concept & Research
The goal of The Letters of Empowerment book was to help create confidence and empower those who will read it. Empowerment is important and promotes other crucial elements of emotional health, like self-confidence and self-worth. We wanted to help children understand what’s empowering and that it’s ok to be confident in themselves.
As a group, we focused on all parts of self-empowerment from body image and self care, to dreams and aspirations.
The Letters of Empowerment Cover Design
Cover design was a challenge due to the eclectic nature of this assignment. There wasn’t a cohesive style between everyone’s designs, so I created one. The cover reflects small parts of what is on the pages inside, redone in a wholesome pastel style that mimics the positive tone of the book.
D is for Dream Big
I chose dream for this spread because people need to remember it’s ok to dream big when it comes to their future. It’s not realistic to say everything is possible if you dream big and work hard, but at the same time kids need to be reminded to not limit themselves to what they and others think are safe and plausible future goals.
Y is for You
I chose you for the letter Y to reiterate what the whole book has been saying at this point: You’re unique, love yourself! My initial concepts were based on a simple family portrait or photo collage that represents different racial groups, social circles, and religions.
After sketch ideations, I decided it was better to make the characters non-human and interesting to make sure not to misrepresent or underrepresent anyone. My initial research also showed that children can still understand deeper concepts through non-literal means, so I created these whacky characters with a base of simple shapes and colors.
Takeaways
Designing for print has complications I haven’t had to work with before so it was quite a challenge, especially to then take the same concepts and ideas back into the digital world for the interactions and Augmented Reality portion. Also the cover design idea took a long time to come up with because I found it hard to represent a whole book of different designs with one single design and concept. I thoroughly enjoyed this project though, and found myself learning much more than expected on working with a bigger group, print design, and designing for deep and important concepts.
Downloadable Assets
You may use the below assets created for this project provided via Figma as long as you give attribution, share your outcomes, and if your use is non-commercial in nature.
